Saturday, October 16, 2004

Wired reports about scientists at Imperial College London who published a paper in Nature Biotechnology, Oct. 6 describing how most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial.

More than 500 different species of bacteria exist in our bodies, making up more than 100 trillion cells. Because our bodies are made of only some several trillion human cells, we are somewhat outnumbered by the aliens. It follows that most of the genes in our bodies are from bacteria, too.